3PAR Launches New Green Storage Initiative

The company says that for every terabyte of storage capacity it sells in 2007, it will invest in ecologically friendly systems, such as wind power.

Storage provider 3PAR on Jan. 19 took the idea of "greening" the data center a step further by announcing that for every terabyte of its Thin Provisioning storage capacity it sells in 2007, 3PAR will purchase the equivalent cost in so-called "carbon credits" to help offset the greenhouse gas emissions of the disk drives required to deliver that capacity.
The result for 3PAR customersand the Earth in generalis something called "carbon neutral" storage, in which the cost of power and cooling emissions from disk drives is offset by investments in ecologically friendly systems, such as wind power.
Thin Provisioning is a 3PAR-created storage feature that lets users of its arrays write to any amount of capacity, yet actually use only a fraction of the total physical storage required by traditional arrays, 3PAR marketing director Craig Nunes told eWEEK.

"In Thin Provisioning, as a user begins writing to the disk, the arrays grab only the physical space needed for the jobwhether its opening an application or whateverand pull it back into the volume," Nunes said. "So all the extra storage capacity isnt touched, and therefore doesnt require any energy to maintain.

"Its a much more efficient way to use storage. In all the information weve seen, this kind of utility can save around 75 percent of power and cooling requirements. Think what can happen in large enterprises, with hundreds of volumes working at the same time," Nunes said.
Organizations using 3PAR hardware and Thin Provisioning reduce not only the cost of their own capacity, power and cooling, but also the overall environmental costs associated with greenhouse gases, Nunes said.
Thin Provisioning energy savings combined with the 3PAR 2007 Carbon Neutral Storage program effectively provides customers with their first and only choice for carbon neutral storage, a spokesperson for the Fremont, Calif.-based company said.
In 2007, estimated offsets purchased by 3PAR will fund clean energy projects that will reduce carbon emissions generated from approximately 700 cars and 8 million pounds of CO2, the spokesperson said.
3PAR will purchase from TerraPass, the leading retailer of greenhouse gas reduction programs in the United States, carbon offsets associated with the power and cooling of approximately 4 petabytes of disk capacity.
"With Thin Provisioning and the 3PAR Carbon Neutral Program, 3PAR customers not only save significant energy costs associated with power and cooling the storage environment, but they also exercise environmental responsibility," said David Scott, president and CEO of 3PAR.
Click here to read more about 3PARs utility storage.
To date, 3PAR customers have allocated about 24 petabytes of usable capacity to their applications. With traditional SAN arrays, this would have required approximately 36 petabytes of raw capacity using a mix of RAID 1 and RAID 5, the spokesperson said.
Using Thin Provisioning, 3PAR customers have achieved the same result by purchasing only 15 petabytes of raw capacitysaving the purchase of approximately 21 petabytes of raw capacity.
Thus, they have achieved the same business results with 60 percent less storage capacity, the spokesperson said. This disparity represents an annualized energy savings of approximately $4 million for 3PAR customers worldwide.
In energy terms, crude oil savings by 3PAR customers are estimated to equal approximately 74,000 barrelsenough oil to fuel 3,000 cars for a full year, the spokesperson said. In environmental terms, the carbon emissions reduced by this amount of crude oil savings would equate to 33,000 tons of CO2, the equivalent emissions of 6,000 cars for an entire year.
For more information on the 3PAR Thin Provisioning and the Carbon Neutral Storage program, go here.Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, reviews and analysis on enterprise and small business storage hardware and software.

Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz